Sarah Ruden

What Lasts?

On the editor and critic Roger Kimball.

This review must begin with a big disclaimer, but one I consider deeply germane to the themes of this book and my take on them. Roger Kimball, the longtime editor of the conservative cultural review New Criterion, was the first literary patron to help me achieve anything solid. Noticing a piece of mine in Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews in 1994—it's characteristic of Kimball that he was alert even to what was going on in an online forum for academic Classicists—he emailed to ask me whether I did any journalism.

Well, now I did. He cheerfully published essays of mine on post-apartheid South Africa (where I lived for a long period), on the American university curriculum, on my own translating work, and even on Christian-Muslim relations. He made my poetry welcome too, giving it a national audience in defiance of the dogma I knew from responses to my submissions elsewhere: Traditional forms and religion? Disqualified on two counts!

As a pacifist Quaker Christian living in the developing world, I had only a wildly flapping overlap with Roger's politics, but he didn't seem to care, and in his pages I fulfilled the fantasy I had nurtured from childhood on of being allowed to "say stuff"—stuff that in a tolerant forum became less fierce and more exploratory, so that, ironically, publication in a conservative periodical helped lead me toward a greater eclecticism in my views outside religion.

Among the delights are the essays on G. K. Chesterton and Rudyard Kipling. These two, in my view, may resist the general best practice of getting to know important authors at length and in a variety of their works and judging for ourselves before turning ...

Richard Rorty is not the most influential philosopher alive today. Nor was he the most influential philosopher even when we was alive.

Daniel Kinoshita

January 31, 20136:15pm

I guess you know that to argue for a more civilized discourse, whether on art or politics is a fruitless exercise today. Richard Rorty, probably the most influential philosopher alive today, proudly admitted himself to be a "modern sophist." He proclaims with Nietzsche that "all is interpretation;" therefore, the use of rhetoric in pursuit of power is the only rational political way of life. If there are no absolute truths, even in logic and mathematics, then what David Hume said is true, that "Reason is and ought to be the slave of passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."
Many, both on the left and right, start with a sort of political idealism; and many, like Ivan in Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor come to the conclusion that the masses are not moved by reason but by emotions and passions, and by bread, miracles, and authority&mdash;you know, what is called "political realism." If one believes, that political and other types of ideas are incommensurable with no common ground, then rhetoric and outshouting one's opponent are the only means of persuasion left.
Of course, this situation is nothing new. If you read Thucydides' The Peloponnesian War, the chapter on the civil war in Corcyra, you know that battle between the aristocrats (Sparta partisans) and democrats (Athens partisans) was a hundred times worse than the situation today with mass slaughter and the complete debasement of language. Thucydides stated that, "Love of power, operating through greed, and through personal ambition, was the cause of all the these evils."
Am I pessimistic about the future? Not really, I am auditing classes at a local university. I already am experiencing the result of a constellation of ideas that goes under the name of "postmodernism, " critical theory, and cultural studies that is slowly exhausting itself. In a graduate course, I poked fun at an assigned paper which I stated paid homage to modern versions of Penates, the Roman household gods. You know, Foucault, Derrida, Rorty, De Man, Saussure, and Barthes. The professor remarked, yes, the author did cite all of them! The graduate students just laughed even the ones who specialized in cultural studies (gender, race, etc).
Face it, anything that is reductive gets to be boring after a while. One gets tired of irony, discontinuity, and special pleading, especially the really bright students.
I hope that the next big thing is to go the completely opposite way. That is to view art as a child does, with openness, innocence, and a delight in verbal magic, illusions, and the dance of life.